Narrator: Far out, near the edge of the solar system,
where the sun's light is weak,
lies a world that, until recently,
was completely unexplored.
Grinspoon: Pluto is the Everest of the solar system,
the farthest and coldest and hardest to reach.
Bagenal: By going to pluto,
we were looking beyond the known solar system
and exploring a whole new world.
Narrator: A small team of young scientists
took it upon themselves
to campaign for a mission to pluto.
We have to just send it out and take those pictures
stern: To be able to see this object
that no humans really could glimpse.
Narrator: Over two and a half decades later,
they achieve their goal
and make this one of the most unique discoveries
in the history of space travel.
Bagenal: It was just extraordinary.
This was a whole new world.
Man: We have liftoff.
There really is something intrinsic in humans
to want to explore.
Grinspoon: You can look at it from an evolutionary perspective.
We didn't have the sharpest claws or the strongest muscles,
but we had this ability to invent and explore,
and, you know, we had curiosity.
Narrator: The exploration of the outer solar system began in the 1970s.
And in 1977,
a pair of spacecraft named voyager 1 and voyager 2
set off to visit the most distant planets,
including uranus and Neptune.
Voyager 2 was the first to leave earth.
Man: 5, 4, 3, 2, 1.
We have ignition, and we have liftoff.
♪♪
Narrator: The mission would fly past Jupiter,
then saturn, before heading for the mysterious outer worlds.
The voyager mission was an incredible adventure
because it was our first time to really visit all of these worlds
and start to get to know their systems --
Not just the planets themselves, but their moons.
Those of us that were involved felt almost as though
we were on board the spacecraft looking out the little window
when the images came up the screen for the first time.
You're seeing these new worlds.
♪♪
When we first visit these planets, they're flybys.
You're not going into orbit, you're not landing,
it's just a very quick visit, and you see it approaching,
and then all of a sudden, there it is,
and then it's in the rearview mirror,
and you can't stop, and you're still going.
♪♪
The first pictures of uranus were a little bit boring,
and people were a little worried about the lack of jazziness.
Uranus is a weird planet.
Instead of spinning, you know,
like we're spinning 23½ degrees from vertical,
uranus is on its side, tipped on its side.
Very strange -- Unlike all the other planets.
Could it have been whanged by something going by,
tipping it over?
We don't know.
Systems -- attitude control?
Man: Copy.
We see lock up on the green box on white band.
September 1989, we're about to arrive at Neptune.
Copy this. Thank you.
Vector.
[ Hushed conversations ]
[ Static ]
♪♪
Again, it's sort of cold and dim,
but Neptune is really a little bit more interesting
than uranus.
We see a blue atmosphere, dark, deep clouds,
and then some white clouds above,
but perhaps the most important thing about Neptune's system
is the big moon, triton.
♪♪
We are pretty sure at this point that triton formed
orbiting the sun, just as pluto did,
and somehow, early in the solar system,
we got captured into orbit around Neptune.
We saw landscapes like nothing we had ever seen before --
Looked like melted wax.
It was clearly a very active world.
There weren't many craters.
So things had been happening very recently.
The most exciting thing and the weird thing that we saw
were black plumes of smoke coming up out of some hole.
[ Murmurs and applause ]
Grinspoon: And seeing that, which was thought
sort of to be a twin of pluto,
I think a lot of people were thinking, "well, wait a minute.
There are other worlds out there."
[ Static ]
♪♪
For many of us, it was, "now what?"
What are we gonna do after voyager?
Is there life after voyager?"
♪♪
I was lucky because a young man called Alan stern --
He was a graduate student -- Came up to me and said,
"what about pluto?
I think we should go to pluto."
After voyageur had the smashing success
all the way across the solar system,
the United States postal service issued a set of stamps,
and on each stamp, they featured the spacecraft
and mission that had been first to that planet.
But for pluto, there had been no exploration.
So they had this lame stamp.
And that stamp became a dare that we should finish this off.
I knew there was a chance that, in my lifetime,
in my career, we could send a space probe off to pluto.
What we didn't know is we were embarking on an adventure
that would last most of our careers.
♪♪
This path to pluto all began with Clyde tombaugh.
Clyde tombaugh was an amazing person.
Announcer: The United States was in the grip
of a paralyzing depression.
Millions were unemployed, on some form of relief.
Grinspoon: He grew up very poor
on a farm in Kansas during the depression,
and as a young kid became enthralled with astronomy
and was self-taught from the local library.
Narrator: In 1928, the young farmer built a telescope
using the crankshaft of an old buick
and pieces of farm equipment,
he dreamed of being an astronomer
but had no plan, no idea how this poor kid
in depression-era Kansas could ever get off the farm.
Well, I was interested in knowledge,
and so, of course, I was fascinated
by what I saw in the sky.
And so I made drawings of Mars and Jupiter.
Narrator: Tombaugh sent his drawings off
to the lowell observatory in Arizona.
They were so impressed by his work
that they offered him a job.
The job was to go off to search for the planet
out beyond Neptune.
Narrator: For decades, there had been a theory
about a hidden planet out beyond Neptune.
Percival lowell, a wealthy businessman and astronomer,
had become obsessed with the theory
and spent the latter part of his life
searching for the mysterious planet,
but never found it.
After his death in 1916, the lowell observatory
that he had founded continued the search.
They had been trying, early years, to find it,
but without any success,
and they weren't doing too thorough a job of it either.
You have to have a very strong mental concentration,
otherwise -- you can't let your mind wander.
You've got to be conscious of seeing every star
to see if it shifts.
And that's very demanding.
Narrator: It was a difficult, painstaking task
with a slim chance of success.
Tombaugh used the telescope
to photograph a tiny patch of the sky onto glass plates.
He studied the images on a special machine
in the hope that he would spot the mysterious planet
as it moved.
But after searching for nearly a year,
he had still found nothing.
♪♪
Grinspoon: A lot of people told him it was futile
and that they would never find it
and people had already looked,
but he was incredibly fastidious.
Narrator: It wouldn't be long before his relentless work paid off
and changed the solar system as we know it.
♪♪
Clyde tombaugh was an amazing person.
Narrator: For decades, there had been a theory
about a hidden planet out beyond Neptune.
Grinspoon: A lot of people told him it was futile
and that they would never find it,
but he was incredibly fastidious.
Narrator: On February 18th, 1930,
he was comparing two photographic plates
taken in late January, six days apart.
He noticed a moving object, so he checked it again.
He photographed the patch of sky a third time.
That's when he realized
he had found a ninth planet beyond Neptune.
Grinspoon: And then they announced it to the world.
Well, I think I just had to let the younger men do it now,
but I feel quite satisfied with what I did in my lifetime.
There's lots of interesting things we can do.
Perhaps the most important thing is to look
at what voyager did not do.
It did not visit pluto.
However, there's the political problem
of trying to sell a mission that will have a 14-year cruise,
will not return information for 14 years.
And when it does, it'll be a half-hour flyby
with a handful of pictures.
You're not going to have 11 instruments.
You're not gonna have the data-taking capability
of voyager.
But remember those nine pictures of triton?
♪♪
We have to cut back our scientific desires to have more
and just send it out and take those pictures.
Stern: It was really a group of young scientists
who wanted to ask NASA,
"why aren't we going to the last of the planets?"
Bagenal: And so it was a bit of an underground movement
of people who were pushing for this underdog, pluto.
So we called ourselves the pluto underground.
In may of 1989, I went to the top
of the NASA planetary exploration program
to a man named Jeff Briggs.
And just straight out asked him, "how about a study
of how to go explore the last of the planets?"
And to my complete surprise,
he smiled and said, "you know, that's a brilliant idea.
No one has ever asked me that before.
I think we should study it."
♪♪
I met Dave is a graduate student, and he was a professor,
and I needed a project to work on,
and she came to me one day and said, "you know, Dave,
the thing I'm working on is not going that well.
Have you got any ideas?"
And I said, yeah, I've been thinking about searching
"for things beyond saturn."
And she said, "okay, that'll be cool."
Luu: They pointed out that the outer solar system
seemed rather empty compared to the inner solar system.
Jewitt: Inside saturn, inside Jupiter,
we knew of lots of asteroids and comets
and all the planets,
and then beyond saturn, nothing much --
Just uranus, Neptune, and pluto.
So he proposed that maybe we should look
in the outer solar system to see if there were things out there.
Narrator: Dave and Jane used the mauna kea observatory in Hawaii.
Jewitt: Mauna kea's 14,000 feet high.
It's above most of the clouds.
It's above most of the water vapor in the atmosphere.
It's the second-best place to put a telescope.
First best would be in space.
♪♪
Luu: So many people would say, "when are you going to stop?"
We were looking for things
that were not predicted to exist by any theory.
Jewitt: So we take a series of pictures --
Four pictures, one after the other,
and the stars and the galaxies,
which are basically infinitely far away, don't move,
but anything in the solar system moves
'cause it's going around the sun,
and the speed depends on its distance.
And we look for anything that is moving slowly
with respect to the stars and the galaxies.
Every time we wanted to stop, the technology would get better.
Jewitt: At the end of August in 1992,
we took the first picture and it came out,
then the second picture came out,
and I pretty much immediately saw this object
that seemed to move and it didn't move much.
Luu: We were very excited
because it was the first believable candidate.
Jewitt: So the third picture came,
and the third picture showed that same object,
but a little bit further over.
[ Camera shutter clicks ]
So the fourth image came out, and it was just perfect.
It was bang, bang, bang, bang,
in a straight line, going to the west,
and during the whole time, we're able to measure it.
And its speed was just a beautiful straight line.
How could that possibly be real?
Like, we've done this so much
and there's just so much rubbish that we get?
How could this possibly be real?
[ Laughs ] Yes.
So we just took picture after picture after picture
after picture for the remaining six hours of the night.
♪♪
Well, this changes our view of the solar system fundamentally,
that there's a whole new, unexplored area out there
of objects.
It was really clear that this was a major breakthrough.
There are 100,000 objects in the kuiper belt
bigger than 60 miles across,
and there's a billion objects in the kuiper belt
bigger than about a mile across.
Grinspoon: Pluto is not just some weird fringe oddball
by itself out on the outer fringes of the solar system,
but in fact was the largest member
of this massive domain of objects.
That clearly is important in the story
of how the solar system came to be.
♪♪
Stern: The competition was really intense,
five teams formed, and frankly, of the five,
our team was the David in a David and Goliath battle.
We had the least experience, but probably the highest motivation.
...no humans really could glimpse as a real planet.
One of the first things that we had to do
was to find a name for it.
And when I was on a long run
across my hometown, Boulder, Colorado,
and I turned around to the west and saw the rocky mountains.
And I thought, "this is a mission of new horizons."
Bagenal: We designed our mission as best we could --
Not too much, but not too little.
Just get it right.
These proposals are phone-book thick
engineering and technical documents.
There's a lot of work
that goes into putting one of these together.
♪♪
On November the 29th, 2001, after 300 days of competition,
I was at a planetary science meeting,
and a NASA scientists came to me and said,
"there's a phone call for you."
And I knew at that moment that that phone call was
the decision.
We would find out if we had won or lost.
And I picked up the phone, and time telescoped.
It slowed down for me incredibly,
and I knew that within moments,
my life would change one way or the other.
Stern: It was really a group of young scientists
who wanted to ask NASA,
"why aren't we going the last of the planets?"
Bagenal: And so it was a bit of an underground movement
of people who were pushing for this underdog, pluto.
Stern: On November the 29th, 2001,
after 300 days of competition,
a NASA scientist came to me and said,
"there's a phone call for you."
And I knew at that moment that that phone call was
the decision.
And fortunately, the phone call was a good one,
and we found out we had won.
It was all systems go to build the spacecraft
and to make it happen.
We were actually going to have an opportunity
to do something that had been our ambition for 14 years.
Grinspoon: Then they actually have to build it
and make it succeed, and they're on a ticking clock.
[ Machinery whirs ]
Weaver: All of the challenges associated with building
a spacecraft
that was small enough, used little enough power
that we could perform when the light levels are so low --
It was just technically very challenging.
Stern: Well, you know, the key to planetary science is
that you really have to go places to get the resolution
to get up close enough to really see what's going on.
We want to get up close and personal.
♪♪
Spencer: The new horizon spacecraft is a small spacecraft,
and then we put it on the biggest rocket
that we had available from NASA at the time, the atlas 5.
♪♪
Buie: We had a number of days where everything's lining up,
and then somewhere along the way,
somebody said, "no, can't go."
That got to be the pattern.
Man: 11, 10, 9, 8, 7, 6...
Buie: I remember, on that one day, the clock's counting down,
and it's getting lower and lower,
and they're not stopping, and I said, "wow,
if they don't stop this, actually,
they're gonna have to send it off."
Man: 5, 4, 3, 2, 1.
We have ignition.
Woman: Yes!
Whoo!
Buie: And sure enough,
that thing took off like nobody's business.
Weaver: We had a picture perfect launch.
At 11:00 P.M., I was out on the balcony
of the hotel where I was staying at cape canaveral...
...just looking up and seeing the beautiful, bright moon,
and the spacecraft was passing, you know,
the orbit of the moon at that time already.
I mean, usually, it took the Apollo astronauts
three days to get there.
So we knew we were speeding on to our destination.
♪♪
Flying past Jupiter allowed us to check out our instruments.
♪♪
Buie: New horizons flew by Jupiter and took advantage
of a particular trick called a gravity assist.
So if you imagine -- Jupiter moving along,
and new horizons is catching up to it,
and Jupiter pulls it forward and then bends the orbit,
and as they keep going,
that interchange will add a little bit more velocity
to the speed of new horizons.
Spacecraft is outward bound from Jupiter,
and we're on our way to pluto.
Congratulations. All right.
We shaved a couple of years off the flight time,
but it was still a very long haul.
Grinspoon: It was another eight years from there to pluto,
so they pioneered this technique of hibernation,
where you put the spacecraft to sleep first for a day
and then for a week and then for weeks.
And it's just sending back a beacon, a beep.
[ Beeps ]
There was this issue about what a planet should or shouldn't be
and whether pluto was one.
Luu: Didn't seem right to call pluto a planet
when there were like thousands of other objects like it.
It's a big kuiper belt object, but it's a kuiper belt object.
There's no doubt about that.
And so the astronomers had a vote.
[ Chuckles ]
Which is ludicrous in itself.
They had a vote on whether pluto was a planet.
And the idea of voting in science -- it's just crazy.
Since when do we vote about scientific fact?
♪♪
In the scientific community,
most planetary scientists simply ignore it.
Olkin: I was so excited when I had the opportunity
to join this mission.
I had been studying pluto for years,
using ground-based telescopes,
trying to understand what was going on
in this fuzzy point of light.
Narrator: The hubble telescope produced the first image
that illuminated pluto.
This image was made up of just eight pixels,
one pixel per 151 square miles of pluto's surface.
And to be able to have a part in the new horizons mission,
where we got to turn pluto from a point of light
into a world where we're mapping the surface, is amazing
buie: Because it's a flyby mission.
We knew we were gonna get a really good shot
at one half of pluto.
The other half -- we would see it, but it would be blurry.
One of the projects was to take images
with the hubble space telescope,
and figured out a map,
but pluto is so far away and so tiny
that, even with hubble,
it's very, very difficult to get any information.
It took about six or seven years worth of computer processing
to get the maps out.
I think this map is probably the best map
we're gonna get prior to the spacecraft getting there.
I said, "here's the deal."
I can tell you right now where you need to go.
There's one patch of pluto that's the brightest part
of the body.
Right next to it
is one of the darkest areas on the entire surface.
You're gonna see the darkest stuff,
you're gonna see the brightest stuff,
and you're gonna see the contact in between,
and then all the northern polar areas.
Narrator: On the fourth of July, 2015,
new horizons had been journeying
towards its target of pluto for over nine years.
As the rest of the country celebrates the holiday
and with only 10 days to go,
Alice bowman, the mission operations manager,
was preparing to upload the main flyby sequence
that would direct new horizons towards pluto.
There are a number of gates that we go through
when we establish communications with the spacecraft.
You know, you see the first gate locked,
the second gate locked, the third gate locked,
and that's when you get your telemetry.
Narrator: But at 1:54 in the afternoon, their worst fears come true.
We went out of lock, the next one went out of lock,
and then we lost the last one out of lock.
Stern: I got a phone call from our project manager,
saying something I almost couldn't process the words for.
He said to me, "Alan, we've lost contact with the spacecraft."
Narrator: On the fourth of July, 2015,
new horizons had spent nine years
journeying towards pluto.
It was just 10 days away from reaching its target.
Stern: I got a phone call from our project manager,
saying, "Alan, we've lost contact with the spacecraft."
I had people that were very upset
that I needed to calm down and have them focus,
'cause I needed their expertise.
Narrator: Just over an hour later,
at 11 minutes past 3:00 in the afternoon,
the team reestablished communication with new horizons.
But the problems were far from over.
The spacecraft reports on its status, and it was bad news.
The spacecraft had overloaded a computer memory
and rebooted itself while this uplink was happening,
of core commands for the encounter sequence,
and all of that software was lost.
Narrator: The team had just three days to rewrite the flyby sequence
and upload it to the spacecraft.
Otherwise, new horizons would miss pluto.
We knew that if we could not fix this problem,
that everything we had invested in the previous 26 years --
All of that was for nothing unless we could fix the problem.
So it was necessary to reboot the computer
and then start rewriting some of that software
and finding the right files and reloading those core sequences,
narrator: But that process took time.
It takes nine hours just to say, "hey, are you okay?"
You know, nine hours later, the spacecraft goes,
"yeah, I'm here. What should I do?"
We all felt that sense of a ticking clock.
Grinspoon: People were sleeping on desks.
People were sleeping on the floor.
Bowman: This is our mission.
We have flown nine and a half years,
and none of us were going to give up --
None of us.
Narrator: After three grueling days,
the team waited for new horizons to respond
and find out if they had saved the mission.
[ Speaking indistinctly ]
Here we go.
Bowman: We saw that the spacecraft had transitioned
into that mode to accomplish the flyby,
and it was pretty amazing.
Narrator: With the flyby sequence initiated,
new horizons turned toward pluto.
♪♪
Bowman: When people ask me what my favorite picture is
of the pluto system --
It's that blurry picture,
the first one that comes down on July 7th.
That's a representation of what we had accomplished
and what we were going to accomplish.
It's one of those moments
that you will never forget in your whole life.
[ Dance music plays, indistinct conversations ]
That I had been working my entire career
leading up to this moment of time.
All: 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1!
[ Cheers and applause ]
Narrator: On July 14th, 2015, new horizons signal to earth
that it had successfully flown by pluto,
but the team had to wait nine more hours
due to the vast distance between earth and pluto
to find out if they had achieved their goal
of photographing this far-off world.
♪♪
Bagenal: So there we were
at Johns Hopkins applied physics lab
with all the press and the family and friends
and a whole bunch of people who were just dying to know
what pluto's like.
Weaver: When we finally get that image down
and we displayed it on the monitor,
it was unbelievable.
♪♪
Bagenal: So there we were
at Johns Hopkins applied physics lab
and with all the press and the family and friends
and a whole bunch of people who were just dying to know
what pluto's like.
Weaver: When we finally get that image down
and we displayed on the monitor...
It was unbelievable.
♪♪
[ Cheers and applause ]
♪♪
The whole team is like...
Aghast at this beautiful image.
♪♪
It was just extraordinary.
This was a whole new world.
Narrator: Just as voyager had revealed at Neptune's moon triton...
New horizons images showed a world
that was geologically active.
Stern: Mountains and ravines and glaciers
and all sorts of indications of activity
and physics taking place on the surface.
It just blew us away.
♪♪
Bagenal: Pluto has mountains.
But these aren't ordinary mountains.
These are mountains of ice -- Water ice --
That are sticking up the size of the rockies --
Huge, big mountains.
Grinspoon: And pluto, as Alan is always saying,
is the Everest of the solar system --
The farthest and coldest and hardest to reach.
And so these mountain ranges were named norgay and Hillary,
after the original explorers of Everest.
Many of the features on pluto
were named after famous explorers
and famous vessels of exploration.
♪♪
As we were flying up to pluto and imaging it
day after day and week after week on approach,
we could see this bright feature on the surface.
♪♪
One morning, we got an image back,
and as soon as it came up on the big screen,
I remember a NASA official who said, "do you see that?
Looks like a heart."
And as we got closer and closer, amazingly,
it looked more and more like a heart.
I think that's what emblazoned pluto into the public mind
as this amazing place at the frontier of our solar system.
Narrator: Pluto's heart extends approximately 1,000 miles across
and is composed of nitrogen ice.
We believe that structure might be supported by water
underneath the surface.
There could be an ocean underneath pluto's surface.
Buie: It's is one of those things where, if you find water,
is there a chance for life?
Wouldn't that be cool,
if pluto's actually one of those places in the solar system
that has or had life on it,
even out at the outer reaches of the solar system?
That's just mind blowing right there.
Narrator: Yet new horizons would make even more unexpected discoveries
as it journeyed further out into the solar system.
♪♪
Bagenal: When we flew behind
and we looked at the sun go behind pluto...
...we saw this big ring of blue sky --
A haze in the upper atmosphere.
♪♪
Narrator: New horizons continued farther into the kuiper belt.
♪♪
And three and a half years later,
on new year's day, 2019,
it reached a small kuiper belt object
officially named arrokoth.
♪♪
Stern: With the spacecraft now a billion miles
farther out than pluto,
here was this fantastically complex object.
It's in a very special category of objects
out in the kuiper belt beyond Neptune.
These are objects we call the cold classical objects.
These are objects that are in very flat circular orbits
that are all traveling around the sun
pretty much parallel to each other.
They very rarely run into each other.
And they clearly have been in these orbits
since the formation of the solar system.
That's the only way they can have such undisturbed orbits.
Olkin: These are the building blocks of solar system formation,
they're the things that didn't get accreted
into the giant planets in the terrestrial planet.
So they're the leftovers out in the deep freeze
of our solar system.
Narrator: These images reveal that arrokoth is made of two objects
that are joined together.
Buie: This can't be done
without a very, very, very slow merging of the two objects.
♪♪
Realizing, "boy, this is how you make planets."
You have to take small objects and bring them together gently
so they will stick
and won't just smash each other to pieces,
and so you can build up things into larger objects
"and eventually end up with things the size of the earth."
And here we were, seeing that process
for the first time in a real object
that had been frozen in the early stages of that process.
Super exciting to be able to take science by leaps and bounds
just from a short period of time
where we're getting data.
♪♪
Just goes to show that this kind of exploration
can really bring people together
no matter where you are in the world.
[ Cheers and applause ]
Do what you're passionate about.
Don't do something because it's easy.
We've opened up a new realm of the solar system,
a new realm of human discovery.
A half-century-long endeavor
that will forever be a legacy of our time.
We changed the world a little bit for the better,
and we made a little something called "history."
♪♪
There is no end to the discoveries
that we can make out here in the solar system.
We are just getting started.
♪♪
[ Cheers and applause ]
When you have a dream -- Something in your heart --
You should follow your heart.
I never grew up
thinking that I would be a part of something like that.
But now, looking back, I realize everyday people make history.
♪♪